For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them …
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows
how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning
and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law
of life. …
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a
tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is
not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . .
Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere
at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the
wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this
longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of
escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a
longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for
life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth,
every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our
own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and
restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than
we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned
how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the
childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever
has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He
wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.*
